Harsh Chinese Reality Feeds a Black Market in Women

Harsh Chinese Reality Feeds a Black Market in Women

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

AOSHI, China -- When a man offered Feng Chenyun temporary
work in another city, she jumped at the chance. Barely literate and
desperately poor, Ms. Feng had two children, 10 and 16, and it was
nearly impossible to scrape together school fees from her small plot
of rice and rape seed.

Her husband was working as a migrant laborer 1,000 miles away, in
Guangdong Province. At 37, she had never left her county in Sichaun
Province and was feeling restless.

"I went with him because he was offering me work," she said,
recounting from her small dark home the start of a tale that still
brings tears three years later. "I just wanted to get out and earn a
bit of money."

Instead, Ms. Feng was kidnapped, drugged, placed on a train and
sold for about $1,500 as a bride to a brick maker in faraway
Xinjiang Province -- becoming one of the tens if not hundreds of
thousands of poor Chinese women who are sold on a black market each
year.

Since last year, the government has been waging a harsh campaign
against trafficking in women, featuring highly publicized arrests,
death sentences, rescues and the like. But the trade, though
significantly damped, still thrives in rural areas because it arises
from the mathematics of gender in rural China, reflected in the
equations of supply and demand:

|In rural China, there are nearly 120 boys for every 100 girls
because rural couples, who favor sons, abort fetuses and abandon
newborns that are female.

|In much of rural China, it is considered culturally and
economically essential that 100 percent of the men find brides and
produce heirs.

|Net sum: For every 100 rural men who marry, 20 others must
resort to extraordinary measures to find brides, like buying women
kidnapped from urban areas.

The trade also reflects the extremely low social status of poor
rural women. Rural girls get inferior schooling, training and
medical attention when compared with boys. Not surprisingly, they
grow up with little hope or confidence. Most kidnappings occur when
uneducated young women leave their hometowns looking for jobs.

"Abduction is a very serious problem for these women," said Xie
Lihua, editor of Rural Women Knowing All, a self-help magazine.
"They have few resources to draw on. They are desperate for work,
but don't know what is suitable or how to find it. So they can be
easily tricked, then forced to work as prostitutes or sold to poor
men who can't find wives."

It is unclear exactly how big the problem is, although reports in
the state press say that as of 1999, the police were rescuing 10,000
women a year, clearly representing only a fraction of those
kidnapped. That year, before the current crackdown started,
abductions of women were rising 30 percent a year, the state press
reported. Abductions of children, generally young boys bought by
heirless families, were rising 15.3 percent a year.

The densely populated, hardscrabble mountain villages of Sichuan
province, like Gaoshi, have become a principal source of women for
sale.

In Sichaun's capital, Chengdu, the dirt lot around the vast
concrete Nine Eye Bridge Labor Market, the city's largest, is dotted
with young country girls in loose shifts and plastic sandals. "Do
you need a worker?" they hopefully ask each visitor who enters.

"So many are abducted from this place," said Zhu Wenguang, a
private detective who rescues abducted women, noting that the city
government recently moved the labor market from a bridge to the edge
of town to try to cut down on the trafficking.

In April, a court in Sichuan sentenced Zhou Legui, a trafficker,
to death for selling more than 100 women to other provinces, many of
whom were abducted from this labor market, press reports said.

"In villages, there is a long tradition of prizing males and
looking down on females," Mr. Zhu explained. "So the best local
women from the countryside can hope for is to get away, to look for
work elsewhere -- and that leaves them very vulnerable."

Mr. Zhu said most of the women are sold to remote places that are
even poorer than rural Sichuan or where the ratio of men to women is
even more lopsided. Studies have found that it approaches 140 to 100
in some places, generally those with strict enforcement of the
family planning policy that limits parents to one or two
children.

In such places, the scarcity of women has already dramatically
altered the economics of marriage: young men must pay the families
of their brides-to-be huge sums, "bride prices," dowries in reverse.

Bride prices in some areas can run over $4,000. "But you can get
an abducted wife on the black market for a quarter of that," Mr. Zhu
said. "So that fuels the trade."

Once the girls have left Sichuan, locating them and bringing them
home is costly and time-consuming, since relatives most often have
no idea where they have gone. Police campaigns have focused mostly
on breaking smuggling rings and bringing traffickers to justice.

Families with money hire Mr. Zhu, a former policeman, to help
rescue those who have disappeared. But he spends months researching
and preparing for each rescue and his services cost about $500, or
10 years' income for many rural families. Many simply give up on
ever seeing their daughters or wives again, just another hardship to
endure.

Down a dirt path in a mountain village so poor and remote that it
is still called the 281 Brigade, a name dating from the Mao-era
collectivization of farms, Peng Zhihua and his wife cling to a
picture of their younger daughter, their only keepsake.

Tall and thin, wearing bright red lipstick, a blue V-neck sweater
and high heeled boots, this trendy girl, Jinlian, is hard to imagine
in her family's crude mud home, where sky peeks through the rough
timbers that serve as a roof and large woven trays of silkworms --
food for the ducks -- are the main fixture in a sitting room.

Peng Jinlian was fond of fashion, so her parents scraped together
the money to send her, at 15, to a seamstress course in nearby
Guangfu Township. She never returned.

On Sept. 29, 1998, she and two friends were lured from Guangfu by
the promise of work, and she was sold as a bride to a man in Shanxi
Province. One friend later escaped and reported her
whereabouts.